[Monotone-devel] need error message for missing dlls on Windows

[Stephen Leake]

When I run a mtn on Windows, it fails with no message if the required
dlls are not in PATH.

The dlls shipped with the binary distribution are zlib1.dll,
libiconv-2.dll

It is not hard to arrange for them to be in PATH; my problem is how to
get a good error message from mtn, rather than the current silence.

I compile mtn with MinGW, but I typically don't have MinGW in PATH
when running, which is why I noticed this problem.

I tried running mtn under gdb (from the GNAT distribution - gcc Ada).
It says that SIGSEGV is raised before it gets to the first line in
win32/main.cc 'main'. This version of gdb won't break on signals, so I
can't get any farther that way.

I assume the linker has added some dll loading code before the call to
'main'.

Some other Windows programs report missing dlls nicely.

One solution is to specify '-static'. On a typical Windows system, the
required dlls are not likely to be used for other programs, so this
might be the best solution.

I know there are ways to load dlls 'manually', which would then give
an opportunity to handle the error more gracefully.

I can't find a manual for the Gnu linker, after half an hour of
searching around on the web! 

Can anyone provide pointers on these issues?

-- 
-- Stephe